Stacking is out.

Stacking is the newest game from Double Fine and was released yesterday on the PSN.

The story revolves around a poor family who's father leaves the house to get a job and disappears.  After a few months of him disappearing the family is in financial dire straights and can't pay bills.  The debtors take the children in the family to work as slaves to pay off the debt.

You play as Charlie (the smallest "runt" of the children) who can stack into a doll one size larger than himself.  You can stack into larger and larger dolls to solve various puzzles to help free your slave bound siblings.  Each person that you stack into has it's own unique attribute which can help to solve the puzzles presented in each level.

The story is presented as a silent film and the music that plays over the cut scenes are classic silent film type scores.  The amount of detail and polish given to the entire game is top notch.  Each section of the game has unique stackable characters to find and each puzzle has multiple ways to solve them.  Even though I love playing puzzle games, I'm not always tuned to the same level of puzzle solving that the creators of the puzzle are.  One great thing about Stacking is the ability to view hints to help solve the puzzles.  There is no penalty for unlocking a hint (at least not that I've seen so far), the only dilemma is showing self restraint versus instant gratification.  On a replay/gameplay extender front, there are unique dolls to find and stack into for each section of the game as well.  Some of these unique dolls also can viewed as a puzzle themselves as some characters are so much larger than what you'd normally be able to stack into, you will spend time trying to find the right number of dolls to stack into.

Stacking is full of charm and is a great change of pace from so many of the current games that are available to play on modern consoles.  Trophies for this game come naturally just by solving puzzles (all iterations of the puzzles of course), finding all of the unique dolls to stack into and completing the story proper.

The game is free PlayStation Plus members but has a price of $14.99 for non-members.  If you enjoyed any previous Tim Schafer and company game (Psychonauts, Grim Fandango, Brutal Legend, or Costume Quest) then this is definitely a game worth picking up.